Giuliana Lazzerini

Giuliana Lazzerini was born in Seravezza near Pietrasanta in Tuscany. Between 1962 and 1968 she was a student at the Istituto D'Arte Stagio Stagi in Pietrasanta, gaining a Master of Arts Diploma. This was followed by a further four years studying painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara.

Giuliana moved to Yorkshire, England in 1987 and now lives in York.

The Tuscan landscape and childhood memories still bear a strong influence upon the artist's current work. In an earlier statement she describes her first encounters with art in Italy as a child in her father's mosaic studio. She refers to the "translucency of the mosaic fragment" and her "fascination with the vibrancy of colour" from the juxtapositioning of the pieces.

These early perceptions, several years on, provide a language and a vocabulary for her pictures in terms of colour, surface, scale of which she uses in the construction of her tapestry-like, interlocking, angular-surfaced village landscapes.

...Architecture exists within a shallow space; Structures are locked together through a medieval, narrative sort of pictorial logic. The viewer's eye is then led through and across these interweaving spaces with the most seductive and delightful channels of colour.

In other works Lazzerini depicts solitary portrait images. Figures often appear with props - shells, cups and boats. There are equestrian references. Are these characters the inhabitants of Lazzerini's interlocking Tuscan villages, or part of some ceremonial ritual? These pictures show an economy in terms of compositional design, with richness of surface mark and colour, reconfirming the artist's earlier delight in light and transparency.

Peter Wooland B.A. (Hons), M.F.A.
Senior Lecturer in painting at the University of Sunderland.
From "The Italian Connection" selected theme exhibition catalogue,
Official Year of The Visual Arts U.K., 1996, Vicarage Cottage Gallery, North Shields, Tyneside.

The landscape of the mind is Giuliana Lazzerini's self-portrait. Living in Great Britain she remembers the Mediterranean; a vision between the imaginary and the literary with the pretext to pay tribute to her masters; Klee, Moses Levy, Giotto and Tuscan painting, her own personal artistic memory.

Antonella Serafini (curator)
From, "The Self-portrait" Ad Occhi Aperti No.3,
Selected artists theme exhibition catalogue, 28.02.98,
Chiostro Di S.Agostino, Pietrasanta, Tuscany, Italy